A middle aged American and a Dutch citizen approached the main
gate of the Vatican on March 11 carrying a briefcase full of fake
bonds with a face value of $4.1 trillion, claiming they had an
appointment with bank officials, say police.

Davide Cardia of the Italian Financial Police said the smartly
dressed fraudsters tried to convince the Swiss guards at the gate
that cardinals were expecting them. With suspicions aroused the
two men were detained.

"When we arrived, the Vatican police had opened the men's
briefcase to find bond certificates valued in US and Hong Kong
dollars, as well as euro, worth €3 trillion," said Lt Col
Davide Cardia.

Investigators assume the fraudsters planned to use the
counterfeit bonds to open a line of credit at the bank.

"We noticed the grammar of the English used on the
certificates was full of mistakes – it looked like they had been
written using Google Translate," Cardia told The Daily
Telegraph. "Searching their hotel room we found the seals
used to forge the bond certificates."

Under Italian law the two men were released as they were caught
before carrying out a fraud and have now likely left Italy.

The Vatican Bank, officially called the Institute for Works of
Religion (IOR), has been at the center of a number of scandals.

"We were surprised the two men tried this scam with the IOR –
maybe they didn't know what is going on there at the
moment," said Lt Col Cardia.

In September 2010 the Italian financial police seized 23 million
euro from a bank account of Credito Artigiano belonging to IOR,
and arrested the president of the IOR Ettore Gotti Tedeschi and
another senior executive, accusing them for money laundering.
Tedeschi was sacked from his post in May 2012.

At the end of 2013 a former Vatican accountant Monsignor Nunzio
Scarano was charged with money laundering, for illegal
transfer of several million euro from Switzerland to rich friends
through the IOR.